Free The Wish House and Other Stories by Rudyard Kipling

shift them. The man who was standin’ up had the false teeth. I saw ’em shinin’ against the black. Fell to bits he did too, like his mate squatting down an’ watchin’ him, both of ’em all wet in the rain. Both burned to charcoal, you see. And – that’s what made me ask about marks just now – the false-toother was tattooed on the arms and chest – a crown and foul anchor with M. V. above.’
    When everything has been said about this story, it is this image which continues to grip the heart and squeeze it. Like the piece of dried bread, it never relaxes its hold on the imagination. Is any explanation, then, possible? Kipling approaches this
coup de théâtre
by a very circuitous route, using several narrators, and yet each apparent digression contributes to the whole.
    Most readers see ‘Mrs Bathurst’ as an obscure tale of elective affinities – the core of which is the passion of a middle-aged warrant officer called Vickery for Mrs Bathurst, a widowed New Zealandhotel keeper. What has passed between them is only guessed at by the narrators. But they agree that Mrs Bathurst is something special. She has ‘It’, hence Vickery’s obsession which manifests itself suddenly and feverishly when, in Cape Town, he sees her for a few seconds on film. She is arriving at Paddington station in search of Vickery. Night after night Vickery watches her – then deserts. Another narrator, Hooper, supplies the grisly denouement above, at the point where the other two, Pyecroft and Pritchard, break off. Vickery’s tattoo shows up white, like writing on a burned letter. There is some dispute as to whether the other body is that of Mrs Bathurst: Pritchard plainly thinks it is, but critics have differed, myself included.
    Though the rambling narration has been denounced by both Kingsley Amis and Angus Wilson, the story is as precise as a Swiss watch. Everything fits, but the reader has to wind it up. The theory of elective affinity stems from the narrators. They fit Vickery’s story to their own experience: sailors, they know, constantly desert for reasons of the heart. Moon has jumped ship in the South Seas for a woman, ‘bein’ a Mormonastic beggar’; Spit-Kid Jones married a ‘cocoanut-woman’. Hooper agrees that some women can drive a man crazy if he doesn’t save himself. Hence the theory. Kipling, however, is careful to show the observant reader that his narrators are unreliable, and to tuck away the truth of the matter. The credulity of Pyecroft and Pritchard is established in the framing story of Boy Niven who dragged them off on a wild goose chase through the woods of British Columbia. In addition, there is a persistent motif of unreliable machinery – trains derailed on straight lines, a gyroscope that goes on the blink, a brake-van chalked for repair, damaged rolling stock, sprung midship frames, ill-fitting false teeth, and so on. It is a broad hint that the machinery of this story is also unreliable.
    Moreover, on ascertainable facts, the narrators are shown to be wrong. Hooper hears a clink of couplings, ‘“It’s those dirty little Malay boys, you see.’” It isn’t. It’s Pyecroft and Pritchard. Similarly, Pyecroft gets an expert to ‘read’ the captain’s face – wrongly as it turns out. Further, Kipling makes Pyecroft employ a variety of foreign phrases, all italicized, adding an extra one to the magazine version –
moi aussi, verbatim, ex officio, status quo, resumé, peeris
and
casus belli.
Taken with other Biblical props from Acts – the beer (‘Others, mocking, said, These men are full of new wine’) and the strong south-easter (‘a sound from heaven like a rushing mighty wind’) – these phrases add up to a parody of the gift of tongues.
    In other words, Pyecroft speaks more than he knows, trusting to erroneous inspiration, as when he compares Vickery’s false teeth to a ‘Marconi ticker’, hinting at strange communication with Mrs Bathurst. Hooper’s tic of dialogue is to